Rich Hollander knew little of his father's life in
Poland or the family left behind there — until he
found a briefcase full of swastika-stamped letters written
in a language he couldn't read.

By Rich Shea
Photos by Frank Klein

Opening Photo: Rich Hollander and son
Craig

The day Rich
Hollander, A&S '70, climbed the stairs to his parents'
attic was a day he'd dreaded. Months earlier, on October
22, 1986, after returning home from his job as a reporter
for WBAL-TV News in Baltimore, he'd received a phone call.
"Mr. Hollander," a police officer said, "I have some bad
news for you." Joseph and Vita Hollander, driving back from
a relative's house, were a few miles from home in a New
York City suburb when, for unknown reasons, their car
swerved off the road and plowed into the side of a store,
killing husband and wife almost instantly. Hollander, then
38 years old, was their only child.

Now, he had to clean out the split-level house they'd lived
in for almost 30 years — a wrenching process he
wanted to finish as quickly as possible. "Everything was in
suspended animation," Hollander says. "They were expecting
to come back. The toothbrushes were there, the bathrobes
hung, food in the pantry."

The attic seemed the least personal space in the house,
littered only with empty airline bags from his father's
travel agency. But after tossing a few, Hollander came
across a tan plastic briefcase labeled "Air India." He
could tell something was inside. "So I open it up," he
recalls, "and I see, very neatly stacked with rubber bands,
these letters. And virtually every letter has Nazi stamps
on it — swastikas. And, also, there were lots of
personal documents, dating back to 1939."

Up to this point, he knew only fragments of his father's
past: Joseph was a Jewish immigrant who had fled Poland as
the Germans invaded; was once married to a woman who wasn't
Rich's mother; and had trouble entering the United States.
He'd also left behind family members in Krakow, all of whom
perished during World War II. But Joseph had never
discussed how they died. As generous as he was in every
other aspect of his life, he refused to talk in detail
about his mother, sisters, brothers-in-law, and nieces, or
display their photos in the house.

But Rich, his hands shaking as he perused the letters,
recognized his grandmother's name: Berta. And the letters,
written in Polish and German, had been sent from Krakow. "I
knew, instantly, they were from [my father's] family," he
says.

Still consumed with grief, and unable to translate the
letters, Hollander stuffed them back in the briefcase,
which he took home to Baltimore. It stayed shut as he
transitioned from journalism to business and, with wife
Ellen, an attorney, raised three children. Not until 2000,
after the kids had grown and he'd thought about the
potential significance of the correspondence, did he reopen
the briefcase and set in motion a series of events that
would result in Every Day Lasts a Year, a
multi-author book that recounts what he calls "parallel
Holocaust stories." While the Hollander family, trapped in
Nazi-occupied Krakow, wrote to Joseph, hoping he could
provide them with potentially life-saving emigration
papers, he was himself engaged in a harrowing legal battle
with a U.S. government dead set on deporting him.

In telling his father's story, Hollander set out to
answer two questions: How did Joseph make his way to the
United States, and how did he deal with his family being
wiped out?

It's a dramatic story — one that includes as a
character Craig Hollander, Rich's son, who collaborated on
the book and is now a second-year PhD student in history at
Johns Hopkins — but it also has historical value.
Christopher Browning, one of two Holocaust scholars who
contributed to Every Day, says that, compared with
random letters, "a virtual complete run for over two years,
fall of '39 to December of '41, reflecting the views of
three generations" is a windfall of primary-source
material.

The book enables readers to observe how one middle-class
family endured under extreme duress. The Hollanders,
mindful of Nazi censors, were cautious in their
descriptions of wartime Krakow and stuck to discussing
family issues. Getting to know them, while cognizant of
their fate, makes Every Day both fascinating and
heartbreaking. In putting the book together, Hollander knew
he'd have to break one of his cardinal rules. When he
taught journalism, he explains, "the first thing I would
say to my students is, 'You are not the story. No one gives
a damn what you have to say.' Well, I couldn't escape that
here."

Hollander
owns and operates Millbrook Communications, a
sports-marketing firm in a converted mill on the outskirts
of Baltimore. At 59, he's fit, trim, and gray-haired, and
prefers wearing something casual, like jeans and a flannel
shirt, to work. He doesn't sit still for long, even while
discussing a favorite subject. When he's engaged in
conversation, words tumble from his mouth. Craig, who at 26
is specializing in early-American history at Hopkins, says
his dad is intellectually curious about almost everything.
"He's really annoying to bring to restaurants," he adds,
"because heaven forbid if the waiter is from another
country."

An admitted news junkie, Hollander was a political science
major at Hopkins, where he was also sports editor of The
News-Letter, then went on to attend the Medill School
of Journalism at Northwestern University. He later worked
for the now-defunct Baltimore News American for five
years and on TV for another 12. Hollander enjoyed
reporting, but because of the hours, he says, "I was
missing too many Little League games." So he retired from
the profession. When he began his research for Every
Day a few years ago, he was forced to call on his old
skills.

The book, published in November by Cambridge University
Press, is divided into three parts: "Joseph's Story" is
Hollander's account of his father's escape from Poland;
"Krakow," written by Browning and Holocaust
survivor-scholar Nechama Tec, puts the Hollanders'
correspondence in historical context; and "The Letters" is
a full run of the correspondence itself, annotated by
Browning and Craig Hollander, who decipher the coded
language used by family members who knew the Nazis would be
reading their mail. The letters alone, Hollander knew,
wouldn't be enough for a whole book, partly because
Joseph's responses, sent to Krakow and never copied, were
missing.

In telling his father's story, Hollander set out to answer
questions that Browning, best known for his book
Ordinary Men, posed to him early on: How did Joseph
make his way to the United States, and how did he deal with
his family being wiped out?

The answers weren't found only in the Krakow letters.
Hollander also had discovered, elsewhere in his parents'
house, love letters they wrote to each other and an
autobiography Joseph had begun for his grandchildren
— Hillary, Craig, and Brett — in 1985. In it,
he writes of growing up in Krakow, earning a law degree,
running a travel agency, and enjoying a comfortable
lifestyle before leaving Poland with his wife, Felicia, at
age 34. Curiously, the autobiography, at 40 handwritten
pages, stops short of his escape. "Did he stop there
because he wasn't able, psychologically, to go on, or is
that the point he'd reached before the accident?" Hollander
asks. "I don't know the answer to that."

He did have the personal papers, including Joseph's
passport, that he'd found in the briefcase. And after
contacting the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where
he hoped to find an immigration-related document or two,
Hollander unearthed another treasure. "Within five
minutes," he says, "they told me they had a 350-page file
on my father." A subsequent inquiry at a New York federal
court turned up hundreds of pages of legal transcripts as
well — pertaining to deportation hearings. "I
couldn't believe this all had to do with my father," he
recalls.

What Hollander discovered turned out to be so compelling
that his chapter on Joseph, originally slotted between
"Krakow" and "The Letters," was moved to the front of the
book. It also helped explain Joseph's unlimited
resourcefulness. Here was a guy who, during a blizzard in
the '50s, hitched a ride in the back of a diaper truck so
he could catch a plane for a business trip. Whenever a
friend or family member was in need, "no problem was
insurmountable," Hollander says. "And now I understand why:
Because [during the war] he experienced the worst you could
possibly experience and was able to deal with it. Nothing
else that life, in business or relationships, could throw
at him topped that."

In the 1930s,
when Joseph was still living in Krakow and traveling across
Europe on business, he didn't like what he saw.
Anti-Semitism was brewing. While working as a travel agent,
Joseph started receiving requests for help from Polish Jews
who had moved to Germany after World War I, only to find
themselves being kicked out by Hitler. These exiled Jews,
no longer recognized as Polish citizens, needed
documentation to move to neutral countries should war break
out. In his autobiography, Joseph, normally a law-abiding
citizen, writes of using his connections in Warsaw to
revalidate hundreds of passports, then securing the
necessary visas by bribing staff in South American
consulates. He wrote that he hated the work, but he knew he
was helping fellow Polish Jews.

Joseph Arthur Hollander

Given what he knew about the Nazis, it is no surprise that
Joseph became a refugee. "The vexing question," Hollander
writes in Every Day, "is why [his] immediate
family... did not flee with him." The letters, he adds,
"indicate that Joseph had warned family and friends of his
fears, and reveal the family's remorse at failing to follow
Joseph's advice to leave Poland. Nevertheless, it is easy
to understand their decision; human imagination could not
conceive of the Final Solution."

By the time the Germans had invaded Poland in early
September 1939, Joseph and Felicia were already at what was
then the Polish-Romanian border. They soon moved on to
Yugoslavia, then Italy, taking under their wing 14-year-old
Arnold Spitzman, who had been separated from his family.
The plan was to go to Portugal and wait out the war.

In late November, they boarded the Vulcania and sailed to
Lisbon, where they were refused entry because their visas
hadn't been stamped by the Portuguese secret police. The
three refugees were now stuck on the ship, which soon made
its way to New York City, arriving on December 6. They
didn't have U.S. visas, either, so Felicia's brother, Jan
Schreiber, a Manhattan resident and recent immigrant
himself, hired a lawyer who secured a court hearing. So
began an almost yearlong legal battle for the trio; they
spent much of that time detained on Ellis Island.

Joseph's family, meanwhile, was sending letters informing
him that they, too, had tried to escape, only to be forced
back to Krakow. There — along with roughly 60,000
other Jews — they experienced the plundering of their
homes, bank accounts, and businesses. The Hollanders had
one advantage, however: They were part of the "assimilated
minority," Tec writes in Every Day. Unlike Jews
living in closed communities, speaking only Yiddish, they'd
attended mainstream schools, learning Polish and German,
and had obtained white-collar employment. After the
invasion, this enabled them to work office jobs that paid
for necessities.

In the early letters, the family assures Joseph and Felicia
that, physically, everyone's fine. Oppressive conditions
— curfews, limited mobility, the crowding of families
into Jewish-only housing — are merely hinted at in
coded language. Western Poland, annexed by Russia as part
of a non-aggression pact with Germany, for example, is
called "Uncle Tolstoy." And Joseph's sister Mania refers to
the recently mandated yellow stars for all Jews as
"uniforms," adding, sarcastically, "I suspect we will look
good in them." Later, complaining about an "old aunt of
ours," a.k.a. the Nazis, another sister, Klara, writes:
"She was always impossible, but now one has to be very
strong-minded around her, in order to tolerate her
demands."

What
Hollander finds amazing about this period is his father's
resilience. In New York, Joseph was learning English,
battling the feds, and attempting to secure emigration
papers for his family in Poland — all from the
confines of Ellis Island, which was split into male and
female dormitories watched over by security guards. "How
you take the weight of that is beyond comprehension,"
Hollander says.

Without proper documentation, Joseph, Felicia, and Arnold
didn't have much of a case. Jewish refugees were fleeing
Europe in droves, and "the State Department was mobilized
to use every bit of bureaucratic red tape they could to
maintain the sanctity of the borders," explains
Browning.

Fortunately, the trio had allies — mainly activists
and politicians, including a few in Congress, who
considered U.S. immigration policy too strict. They also
had high-profile observers, among them The New York
Times and a Polish-language newspaper. One of
Hollander's most notable finds among his father's National
Archives files is a letter Joseph either typed himself or
dictated, in halting English, and sent to Eleanor Roosevelt
a few days before Christmas in 1939. In it, he respectfully
begs the First Lady for help by recounting the trio's
journey and claiming that deportation to Europe "means
death for us." Only two days after Christmas, the same
letter arrived at the office of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service with a note attached, stating: "In
answering them, please say that you are doing so at Mrs.
Roosevelt's request."

Hollander says that when he took the information he'd found
to Marian Smith, an immigration historian, she told him
Joseph was the "Elian Gonzalez of 1940. He was basically a
test case."

Over the next several months, the trio's case was tried
and, after numerous appeals, lost — administratively
at first, then in the federal courts. They were ordered to
report for deportation in September 1940. But political
pressure, mixed with bureaucratic loopholes and an
increasing awareness of the European conflagration,
afforded Joseph, Felicia, and Arnold parole until they
could find refuge elsewhere. Hence Mexico is referred to in
the Krakow letters.

Those letters turned ebullient in December 1940, when
Joseph managed to send the family Nicaraguan emigration
documents. "These papers fell like stars from the sky!"
Genka, Joseph's teenage niece, writes. "Viva Nicaragua! We
simply lost our heads out of joy! . . . I would like to
know something more specific about the land of our future.
Is it a land that flows with milk and honey?" But the
celebration was short-lived. It soon became apparent that
the Nazis, about to establish a Jewish ghetto in Krakow,
were no longer permitting emigration. Several months later,
from a cramped apartment and with food supplies running
low, Genka writes: "We try to go from one day to the next.
. . . I believe that everything is possible, things are
just more and less probable."

At the end of 1941, correspondence between Joseph and the
family ceased, although occasional updates were provided by
an in-law living in Switzerland. Unbeknownst to Joseph, the
Nazis began raiding the Polish ghettos in 1942, either
killing Jews or sending them to concentration camps —
a liquidation process that would eventually claim the
Hollanders' lives. Genka and her sister, Lusia, if they had
survived, would have been in their 20s when Rich Hollander
was born in 1948. But his cousins were rarely mentioned
while he was growing up. When he initially read the
translated letters, it made him sad and angry that their
lives had been destroyed. But, he adds, "for the first
time, I became connected to these people. And each one had
a different personality."

History often labels those killed during the Holocaust as
victims only, which Hollander considers a great disservice.
The Krakow letters, he says, show that, "even under this
extreme stress and degradation and humiliation, you see
these individuals." Dola, for example, Joseph's other
sister: Her first husband fled Krakow, leaving her behind,
and later died. So she started over by marrying another man
and learning a new trade, in preparation for a post-war
career. "She was anything but a passive victim, anything
but fatalistic," Hollander insists.

Joseph, cut from the same cloth, faced his own challenges
in the States. Although he'd located Arnold Spitzman's
family in Brazil, where the boy was soon sent, his marriage
was falling apart. Felicia — a blond-haired,
statuesque beauty considered vain by many in the Hollander
clan — filed for divorce in early 1943. No particular
reason is given, but Rich Hollander writes that she soon
married a man "who was more than 20 years her senior and
lived on Fifth Avenue in New York."

At this point, Joseph's story takes yet another turn, one
that Hollander, especially, has reason to appreciate.
Joseph was told of a new federal law allowing immigrants
who joined the U.S. military to become naturalized
citizens. He did so in November 1943 and, after basic
training, boarded a train for his post in New Jersey.
Sitting next to him was Vita Fischman, 10 years his junior,
who was a professional illustrator working for the U.S.
Army. From the beginning, theirs was a storybook romance, a
yin-yang relationship between a pragmatic Polish
businessman and an optimistic American-born artiste. The
couple married on February 28, 1945, the day before Joseph
shipped off to serve in Europe.

Because of his linguistic fluency, he held an
administrative post in Germany after its surrender. And,
looking for a souvenir, Joseph axed a chunk of marble from
Hitler's desk in Berlin, writing to Vita that it was the
surface upon which the dictator "signed so many treaties
and agreements he never kept and so many murder decrees he
fulfilled to the last word."

Not yet knowing the fate of his family, Joseph also tapped
connections in Europe and visited Poland to try to find if
anyone had survived. He came across a woman who said she'd
spent time with Klara's family, including Genka and Lusia,
in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But that's as far
as he got.

Although
Joseph returned to New York not knowing exactly what had
happened to his family, there was no doubt they had
perished — a fact Browning establishes in detail in
Every Day. A history professor at the University of
North Carolina and the author of several other
Holocaust-related volumes, Browning was instrumental in
getting the book published. But it was Hollander who
started the ball rolling.

In 2000, after reopening the briefcase, he used the return
addresses and his father's documents to visit various
Hollander landmarks in Krakow. But he still couldn't read
the letters, so, after returning home, he took them to
Barbara Bernhardt, then a professor at American University
in Washington, D.C., for translation. Months later, when he
visited the professor, she was in tears, saying of the
letters, "You don't understand what you have here."

Craig Hollander had a similar reaction, after reading the
translations, in spring of 2003. Then a junior at Columbia
University, he decided that, although his focus was
American history, he'd write a senior thesis putting the
letters in the context of Nazi-occupied Poland. Titled
"Reading Between the Lines," the paper eventually won a
prize for best undergraduate thesis on a non-American topic
at Columbia, and his research led the Hollanders to
Browning, who sold Cambridge University Press on their
story.

The book, Browning says, is unusual in historical terms.
"When you combine the letters with [Joseph's] story,
overall, it takes on a whole new dimension," he explains.
The alternative might be a survivor's memoir, which filters
out the everyday aspects of wartime existence. "What is in
these letters," he adds, "is the co-mingling of everyday
life with the shadow of the Holocaust," giving the
correspondence a cumulative power.

Craig, who co-authored with Browning the introductions to
the letters, says he'd like nothing more than to have
Every Day be "a staple in every research library,"
serving as primary-source material for future historical
texts. But Browning is right: Reading the correspondence,
you feel as if you've spent a good deal of time with the
Hollanders, listening to them joke, bicker, laugh, cry, and
celebrate.

"The real tragedy," Craig says, "is that there isn't more,
that their lives were cut short . . . because of the
Holocaust. That's the implicit lesson in all this —
that you can't learn more because they were murdered."

The one exception was Berta, Joseph's mother, who, despite
repeated claims of feeling fine, suffered health problems.
In November 1941, she writes to Joseph, after praising his
accomplishments, "You write that you are proud of your old
mother, but how could I not first be proud to possess such
a treasure that is greater than a fortune?"

A year later, Joseph heard from his in-law in Switzerland.
"I have to inform you," she writes, "that your Dear Mother
died peacefully and without pain on August 28, 1942. It is
unfortunately God's will, and we humans cannot help it."

One obvious
question is why it took Rich Hollander 14 years to reopen
that briefcase. He admits his behavior was odd, adding,
however, that it was "history repeating itself." Joseph,
adored by those who knew him, drew a line between his
Polish past and life in the States, where he resumed his
travel business and contributed to Jewish-related causes.
Ellen Hollander, who married Rich in 1972 and is now a
state judge, says that, when it came to talking about those
who had died, "there was this wall. And out of a desire not
to hurt [Joseph], you just didn't broach the subject."

"The real tragedy," says Craig Hollander, "is that there
isn't more. That's the implicit message — that you
can't learn more because they were
murdered."

"Survivor guilt," it's called. And it was so strong in
Joseph — who helped hundreds of Jews escape Europe
before the war but was unable to save his own family
— that he was incapable of dealing with the
documents, Hollander says of the letters. "And with my
parents dying violently . . . I was, on a certain emotional
and psychological level, unable to tackle that process when
I found them. It's a sort of parallelism there."

He did tackle it, however, bringing to the process decades
of pent-up curiosity that enabled him to answer Browning's
crucial question: How was Joseph, after the war, able to go
on?

"It was my mother," Hollander says, seated in his Baltimore
office, where the walls are splashed with the vibrant
colors of a handful of oil paintings depicting the
Caribbean and Mexico, all created by Vita. In the book,
Hollander describes her as a gatekeeper. She "screened
books, magazines, and movies for Holocaust themes," he
writes, "to keep the Holocaust at a distance."

Her protectiveness was born of an exceptionally close
relationship. "I could give you the names of hundreds of
people who would vouch for the fact that no two people had
a stronger, more loving marriage than my parents,"
Hollander says. He wasn't sure that he should include
excerpts from their love letters in Every Day. But
he eventually decided, and rightly so, that they'd help
advance the story.

In 1945, for example, Joseph described to Vita the horrors
he'd witnessed while marching with fellow soldiers through
war-ravaged Europe. He despaired over not yet finding his
family. In response, Vita wrote: "The news you have been
looking for these years might be more attainable now
— whether it be good or bad — at least you will
know. We can look forward to and hope for the best —
but please, darling, should it be bad — 'take it' and
know that you have me to come home to — in another
world."

That world, of course, would later be inhabited by
Hollander, Ellen, and their children, whom Vita and Joseph
were planning to take to Disneyworld at the time of the
accident. Craig was just 4 then, but he has a few memories
of his grandparents — one, in particular, of a
restless sleepover at their house.

"I had one arm under my head, so I'd probably cut off the
circulation," he recalls. "And my heartbeat in my ear was
making me think I heard soldiers marching."

Joseph was soon by his side, asking what the problem was.
After Craig told him, he tucked his grandson in and
whispered, "You sleep now. I'm going to order the soldiers
to stop marching."